5 Questions One Should Consider Before Opting For Hybrid Mobile Applications

Hybrid mobile apps are like any other apps which get installed easily and are available on your phone. You can find them in app stores and with them, you can play games, get social through social media, make financial transactions and much more.Does your business need a Mobile App?

A well-written hybrid app will look or behave similarly as its native equivalent. As far as users are concerned they don’t care either way. They simply want an application that works well. However, Hybrid Mobile Applications do provide some of the benefits over others.

The hybrid mobile app has become a revolution in mobile app development. This has a simple logic, hybrid mobile apps enable developers to use web technologies (HTML, CSS, and Javascript) to target multiple mobile platforms from a single code base, rather than writing native code (Objective-C, Swift, Java, C#) for each platform separately. By this, hybrid mobile apps significantly reduce the time and cost of mobile app development.

Hybrid mobile application development enables developers to target more than one platform.

But not everytime it is advisable to get a hybrid mobile app made. Let’s understand when you should build a hybrid mobile app:

It is mandatory to analyse the technical and non-technical merits of hybrid versus alternatives like web and native, before you decide – in terms of your mobile application’s requirements. For example:

1. Which mobile platforms to be targeted?

When one wishes to target more than one platform, one has a number of choices. Evidently, the web offers a highly attractive solution for this requirement. Hybrid lends itself well to this approach as well. Native – on the other hand – definitely stands out, as native deliverables can built using cross-platform technologies like Xamarin, React Native, and NativeScript.

2. How do you want to distribute the application?

If you want to distribute your application via an app store, you must build a hybrid or native application. You cannot distribute websites through app stores; that’s what your browser’s address bar is for!

3. Whether you would utilize the capabilities of the mobile device?

Where websites have a restricted set of abilities, hybrid and native applications win. These restrictions are borne by browser, effectively taking it away from the mobile operating system. Recent developments with mobile browsers have uncovered more device capabilities through HTML5 such as the camera, geolocation, and others.

However, these advancements are not enough since the support for advanced functionality is quite limited. It’s often affirmed that native is best suited for applications where graphics performance is paramount. That specified, a number of solutions for hybrid mobile applications exist. These include HTML5 Canvas and WebGL, both of which are well-suited for building applications like games.

4. How do rate the technical abilities of your development team?

This pointer may sound out-of-the-place but is an underrated pointer. It is very important to consider - when evaluating your development options for mobile is your team’s technical abilities. Native application requires developers who are experienced with the platform SDKs and programming languages of every platform to be targeted. On the other hand, web and hybrid applications are built using web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. So it becomes quintessential to have a team that can target multiple platforms with a single set of technologies.

5. Does the one-size-fits-all approach of hybrid really work well?

Last but not the least, it’s important to recognize that hybrid isn’t the be-all and end-all approach for mobile application development. In fact, with hybrid, you can find yourself targeting the features of a mobile platform only to discover that they’re inaccessible because the plug-ins for them are out-of-date and unreliable.

Conclusion

These and other questions are worth asking before embarking upon development of a mobile application. Hybrid Mobile App does present cutting edge by reducing cost of development across multiple platform, when developed across multiple platforms (iOS, Android, etc.)., the same HTML components can be used for different mobile OS. This significantly reduces development costs and effort. Also, a hybrid app can fully utilize all the features available in the smart device and it combines the best of both worlds by offering its full variety of features and content.